The voices themselves cross every imaginable line class, age, race, sexual persuasion. Cleverly these all progress the story from the initial event, the resulting police involvement and the consequences of the fall out of the event on the people concerned as family and friendship loyalties are pushed to the extremes.

The story is told through the eyes of a number of people: - the host, Hector his glamorous Indian wife the teenage assistant at her vet surgery who has had a relationship with Hector the girl's male gay best friend the mother of the child the cousin who applies the slap and his wife Hector's father and so on. The result is a book that is high on the shock factor and few, if any, of the characters are wholly sympathetic, although all are sympathetically dealt with by the author. But all the rest are here: religious prejudice, racism, adultery, class, inappropriate relationships, homosexual prejudice, very strong language, drugs, alcohol, and most of all heavy doses of sexist-bordering on mysogenistic behaviour in the clash of a patriarchal immigrant community (Greek) in modern day Australia.

About the only issue that doesn't get an airing is cruelty to animals, and since the host's wife is a vet, I was fully expecting an instance of koala torture to appear at some point. There are few areas of political correctness that The Slap doesn't dip into - and indeed the eponymous Slap is in fact one of the least shocking of view points. This is the event at the heart of Christos Tsiolkas' Man Booker-nominated novel, set in Melbourne, Australia, when at a barbeque for friends and family, the host's cousin slaps the child of the best friend of the host's wife.įor many people, Melbourne is associated with a certain daytime soap opera on television - and indeed one of the characters is a writer for a television soap opera - but this is Neighbours Gone Feral. At times brutal, and often controversial, the book doles out a high level of honesty with compassion for the characters. Summary: Tackling a large number of issues, this is a book that will almost guarantee you will be offended at the characters' behaviour at some point.

The slap author christos tsiolkas